Table Of Content
When President John Adams arrived in Washington to move into the White House in november 1800, there were no separate service structures except for simple brick stables two blocks away; the grounds held only workers’ sheds. It was up to him and Mrs. Adams to make the unfinished brick and stone interior shell habitable. The basement, containing work and chamber spaces for cooks, housekeepers, and servants, probably seemed more cozy and finished than the principal rooms above.
Second floor
When the President meets around the large mahogany table with the Cabinet Secretaries, each is assigned a chair based on the date their department was established with the oldest Cabinet departments seated closest to the center. The President sits at the center of the table with his back to the Rose Garden doors and opposite the Vice President. In the Cabinet Room, the President meets with the Cabinet Secretaries, members of Congress, the National Security Council, and foreign Heads of State on topics ranging from energy efficiency to national security.
When Was the White House Built?
To the left of the mason is a lower brick wall that seems to be directly under the third window bay, with an arch springing from it. Jefferson’s first addition was neither in the house nor in the wings but an exterior ice house constructed just west of the house in 1801. Some functions might wait, but those related to the quality of food and drink could not! This 18 foot round by 16 foot deep structure was not unlike the ice house constructed as part of the north wing at Monticello in 1802. The ice house was then joined to the west side of the basement level by what must have been a simple frame structure that also served to shelter the preexisting well just west of the house.
James Hoban: Architect of the White House
Latrobe complained about the president’s “calculations of his coal cellars” and that a few inches difference in size for the cellars, be they for “coals or dung,” did not matter. This reference seems to be linked to the one that immediately followed, referring to two spaces of 10 feet each. Jefferson apparently increased the size of the sec-ond room to 10 feet wide, a width that still worked with the exterior openings and made the adjacent necessary 10 feet wide. The Walter plan shows a much larger second room of about 20 feet wide, the combination of Jefferson’s two rooms, that in later plans is still labeled as wood and coal storage.
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Whatever he had contemplated (and we must take him at his word that he had), Jefferson accepted Latrobe’s idea for distant middle pavilion coach houses and stables. Making the pavilion’s upper floor level with the north grade would pose yet another grade-building height to conquer, especially with a steeper grade for horses and carriages. At the same time Jefferson affirmed what he had drawn in his wing plan, that the stables and coach house would be closer to the house, even if temporary. Latrobe raised a good question when asking how carriages and horses would exit through the southern colonnade.
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In 1927 the attic was enlarged and finished as a Third Floor while the White House roof was rebuilt. William Taft hired architect Nathan Wyeth to expand the executive wing in 1909, resulting in the formation of the Oval Office as the president’s work space. In 1913, the White House added another enduring feature with Ellen Wilson’s Rose Garden. A fire during the Hoover administration in 1929 destroyed the executive wing and led to more renovations, which continued after Franklin Roosevelt entered office. Hoban’s 1818 construction estimate for the wings reveals little about Jefferson’s original plans or departures from what existed before the fire. Hoban’s specification of copper for the wing roofs does not detail the roof construction or shape.
The President's Neighborhood
From early illustrations it appears that the roof had a low profile behind the low parapet and might still have served as a terrace walk. The roof was apparently flat enough to serve the first greenhouse added on top of the west wing in 1857. Hoban’s estimate for the wing’s ground-up construction provides some evidence of the extent of Jefferson’s west wing.
Native Americans and the White House
In 1835 the old Treasury fireproof building was upgraded from toolshed to orangery by Andrew Jackson to house a salvaged sago palm from Mount vernon, among other things. Kimball’s book also depicted Monticello’s prototypical north and south colonnaded wings. The difference in function between these and the White House wings had to do with what was already housed in the basements and the scope and function of each house. Jefferson’s preference at the White House was for paid servants.9 Monticello’s wings captured most of the economic and domestic functions of a large Virginia plantation that ordinarily existed as separate buildings arranged hierarchically in the surrounding and distant landscape.
The mostly barren shell vacated by John and Abigail Adams was a tabula rasa, as were the grounds around the house, facilitating the amateur architect’s fertile imagination to produce remodeling solutions to the former and initial plans for the latter. If the White House is, as the historian William Seale has written, “an American Idea,”1 it includes one of Jefferson’s most tenacious architectural ideas— domestic service wings. Jefferson did not invent the concept but borrowed it from those seen attached to Renaissance villas in Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (1570). Domestic service wings appear in Jefferson’s earliest drawings for his bookish Palladian- style home, Monticello, built in the early 1770s. Placing domestic outbuilding functions in wings gave order to what would have been the typical scattered backyard arrangement of necessary buildings; more important for Jefferson, it saved the space for ornamental landscaped gardens.
Its window most certainly would have been used originally for light, as opposed to the blind window shown on the Walter plan. “Meat house” was a term contemporary with “smokehouse,” a structure where meats were smoked and salted for curing and then usually suspended from the rafters until needed. The difference with this meat house, due to Jefferson’s flat terrace roof above, was that it did not have the typical tall pyramidal peaked roof wherein the hams cured in the upper reaches of smoke. This would not be necessary for constructing the floor above a cellar or for creating a ceiling above a cellar space, but it would be necessary if the floor structure needed to be fireproof for a fireplace or firepit in the room.
These include a period drawing, personal and official correspondence, and physical evidence shown in photographs. The West Wing's three floors contain offices for the vice president, White House chief of staff, the counselor to the president, the senior advisor to the president, the White House press secretary, and their support staffs. Adjoining the press secretary's office, in the colonnade between the West Wing and the Executive Residence, is the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, along with workspace for the White House press corps. His six children and White House staff were crowded on the second floor of the White House. Congress appropriated $65,000 for the construction of a temporary, one-story office building just west of the White House. Most presidents have hung a portrait of George Washington – usually the Rembrandt Peale "Porthole" portrait or the Charles Willson Peale three-quarter-length portrait – over the mantel at the north end of the room.
Next door to the White House, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) commands a unique position in both our national history and architectural heritage. Designed by Supervising Architect of the Treasury, Alfred B. Mullett, it was built from 1871 to 1888 to house the growing staffs of the State, War, and Navy Departments, and is considered one of the best examples of French Second Empire architecture in the country. In bold contrast to many of the somber classical revival buildings in Washington, the EEOB’s flamboyant style epitomizes the optimism and exuberance of the post–Civil War period. President Theodore Roosevelt chose for a major White House remodeling in 1902 the new York architect Charles McKim of the famous McKim, Mead & White firm. McKim sought to bring Beaux-Arts order to the exterior by removing what he considered as unsightly the greenhouses that crept out from the house in a southwestwardly direction.
The terraces, as constructed, were used for household functions and didnot provide additional office space. The president continued to live andwork in the White House proper for the remainder of the century with hisexecutive offices taking up much of the second floor, the same floor asthe living quarters. Roosevelt moved the offices of the executive branch into the newly constructed wing in 1902.
Hayes also relocated the billiard room to a space in the lower wing and reinstalled Jefferson’s prominent glass doors that let family or guests promenade from the dining room into the popular tropical plant splendor. Jefferson’s response to Latrobe’s critique contains the first mention of a wing extension. Jefferson wanted an immediate extension for a coach house 60 feet long with a north doorway for horses. Latrobe considered his own drawings the more accurate ones for Lenthall to follow while reconciling Jefferson’s ideal design regularity to the reality of wall thicknesses and the practical space in each room.
What the cellar was used for is unknown, although the proximity might indicate that it could have housed wood for the fires above. The possibility that the fireplace was located below the space seems to be negated by Jefferson’s use of the word “cellar,” which implies storage. The stairway, constituting the second room space, in addition to accessing the “cellar below,” could also have accessed the underside of the necessary where waste could be removed.
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